Study finds CEOs spend a third of their time sitting in rooms like this. (Shutterstock)

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It's no big secret that CEOs can make completely ridiculous amounts of money; what is less obvious to some is what they do that's so darn valuable. A group of London School of Economics and Harvard Business School scholars decided to dig into one aspect of CEOs' work week, by taking a look at how more than 500 of them organize their time. In their study, the executives' personal assistants recorded any activity the CEOs did that was at least 15 minutes long. The big reveal: CEOs are rarely alone, and spend a lot of their time in meetings (about 1/3 of their week), at business meals (about 5 hours per week), and on the phone (3 hours).

Those stats apply to one sample of 65 CEOs, who worked an average of 55 hours a week. The group also spent work time doing things like: traveling, lunching with their spouse, or exercising. Total amount of time spent working alone? Six hours. If this is a big surprise to you, it's not for CEOs, who reported that managing employees and interacting with clients is one of their main responsibilities. But for any CEOs mourning the loss of alone time, the Wall Street Journal shares one interesting finding from the study: The CEOs of companies that also had a CFO or COO spent about 5.5 fewer hours in meetings each week.

ok... so long ago I dated a "CEO"... and to be fair he worked his ass off! often long into the night every day... while I agree things are amiss in our system... it is not all fun and games for these guys

quersty

Feb 14, 2012 3:51 PM CST

The chief executives of most large organizations do mostly this. Including government organizations. You think the head of the US Treasury doesn't spend most days in meetings and delegating work? And have other people write speeches for them? This is not specific to capitalism. The worst are the semi-government ones that don't have to make a profit but claim their CEOs should be paid like the private sector. The CEOs like Steve Jobs who actually add value are rare.

Bundy714

Feb 14, 2012 2:53 PM CST

Of course the conservative capitalists will say that they are making hard decisions running the company during those meetings and 6 hours of actual work, and that justifies their pay. But we have seen that even when they make decisions that destroy a companies stock rating, and ruin the company, they are still given a multimillion dollar severance package just to go away. They aren't paid for performance, they are paid for being in the good ole boys club. Good job or bad job, makes no difference. How many times have you seen a company hire a new CEO that was run off (or paid off) from his last two disastrous jobs and still they give him more money than most can spend in a lifetime to give it another try? Want a quick example, HP hiring Leo Apotheker after he got SAP into all kinds of legal trouble and was paid to leave. Then what's he do at HP? Apotheker served less than 11 months as HP's CEO, he received over US $13 million in compensation: a severance payment of $7.2 million, shares worth $3.56 million and a performance bonus of $2.4 million, although the company lost more than $30 billion in market capitalization during his tenure. Did you notice the "performance bonus"????? They company lost $30 billion of market capitalization in his 11 months and he got a performance bonus on top of his astronomical salary. But if we complain about stuff like this, it's class warfare and we just want to be paid for nothing. Looks to me like someone is already being paid for nothing, and it sure isn't the people doing actual work. Apotheker and HP aren't the only ones, they are just typical of all corporate CEO's.